The Signature of All Things

Father, I lay the most urgent stress upon you not to send this man to Tahiti. Any fool can grow a vanilla vine. Get another Frenchman for that job, or a hire a missionary gone bored. Any blockhead’s brother can manage a plantation, but no one can make botanical illustrations in the manner of Ambrose Pike. Do not let the chance slip for you to keep him here with us. I seldom give you such strong counsel, Father, but I must plead with you tonight in the plainest terms—do not lose this one. You shall regret it.”
    There was another long silence. Another slurp from Hanneke.
    “He will need a studio,” Henry said at last. “Printing presses, that sort of thing.”
    “He can share the carriage house with me,” Alma said. “I have plenty of room for him.”
    So it was decided.
    Henry limped off to bed. Alma and Hanneke were left staring at each other. Hanneke said nothing, but Alma did not like the expression on her face.
    “ Wat? ” Alma finally demanded.
    “ Wat voor spelletje speel je? ” Hanneke asked.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alma said. “I am not playing a game.”
    The old housekeeper shrugged. “As you insist,” she said, in deliberately accentuated English. “You are the mistress of this house.”
    Then Hanneke stood up, quaffed back the last of her coffee, and returned to her rooms in the basement—leaving a mess behind in the drawing room for someone else to clean up.

Chapter Fifteen
    T hey became inseparable, Alma and Ambrose. They soon spent nearly every moment together. Alma instructed Hanneke to move Mr. Pike out of the guest wing and into Prudence’s old bedroom, on the second floor of the house, directly across the hall from Alma’s own room. Hanneke protested the incursion of a stranger into the family’s private living quarters (it was not proper, she said, nor safe, and most especially, we do not know him ), but Alma overruled her, and the move was made. Alma herself cleared space for Ambrose in the carriage house, in a disused tack room next to her own study. Within a fortnight, his first printing presses had arrived. Soon after that, Alma purchased for him a fine bureau-escritoire, with pigeonholes and stacks of broad, shallow drawers to hold his drawings.
    “I’ve never before had my own desk,” Ambrose told her. “It makes me feel uncharacteristically important. It makes me feel like an aide-de-camp . ”
    A single door separated their two studies—and that door was never closed. All day long, Alma and Ambrose walked back and forth into each other’s rooms, looking in on the other’s progress, and showing each other some item or other of interest in a specimen jar, or on a microscope slide. They ate buttered toast together every morning, had gypsy lunches out in the fields, and stayed up late into the night, helping Henry with his correspondence, or looking over old volumes from the White Acre library. On Sundays, Ambrose joined Alma for church with the dull, droning Swedish Lutherans, dutifully reciting prayers alongside her.
    They spoke or they were silent—it did not seem to matter much one way or the other—but they were never apart.
    During the hours that Alma worked in the moss beds, Ambrose sprawled out on the grass nearby, reading. While Ambrose sketched in the orchid house, Alma pulled up a chair beside him, working on her own correspondence. She had never before spent much time in the orchid house, but since Ambrose’s arrival, it had been transformed into the most stunning location at White Acre. He had spent nearly two weeks cleaning each of the hundreds of glass panes so that sunlight entered in crisp, unfiltered columns. He mopped and waxed the floors until they glittered. What’s more—and rather astonishingly—he spent another week burnishing the leaves of every individual orchid plant with banana peels, until they all shone like tea services polished by a loyal butler.
    “What’s next, Ambrose?” Alma teased. “Shall we now comb out the hair of every fern on the property?”
    “I do not think the ferns would object,” he said.
    In fact, something curious had occurred at White Acre right after Ambrose brought such shine and order to the orchid house: the rest of the estate suddenly seemed drab by comparison. It was as though someone had polished only a single spot on a dingy old mirror, and now, as a result, the rest of the mirror looked truly filthy. One wouldn’t have noticed it before, but now it was obvious. It